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King’s Birthdays

“It is always jarring,” our Amy Davidson writes today, “to think about just how young King was when he led those marches and made those speeches, and when he died.”

That it is: jarring—and heartbreaking.

Think of it this way.

John F. Kennedy’s life was also cut short by an assassin’s bullet. But if he had died at King’s age—thirty-nine years and eleven weeks—how would he be remembered today? Vaguely, that’s how. At best.

At the 1956 Democratic convention, as a way of generating excitement, the Presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, left it to the delegates to choose his running mate. Young Jack Kennedy, the handsome junior senator from Massachusetts, made a surprisingly strong showing, but lost on the second ballot to his better-known colleague Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee populist. The day the convention ended, Kennedy was thirty-nine years old—thirty-nine years and seven weeks. Had he died four weeks later, people would occasionally have wondered what might have been. But he would now be remembered, when remembered at all, as something between a footnote and a chapter in the annals of Democratic Vice-Presidential politics—in terms of his impact on history, somewhat less important than, say, Thomas Eagleton.

Or think of it this way.

Another of the twentieth century’s murdered martyrs was King’s hero and model, Mohandas K. Gandhi, shot dead in 1948, aged seventy-eight, by a Hindu nationalist who hated him because of his attempts to protect Muslims from Hindu violence (and vice versa, of course).

If Gandhi had been King’s age at his death, we would almost certainly have never heard of him. At thirty-nine, Gandhi was a prominent leader of South Africa’s Indian community, but he was still a long way from Mahatmahood. He had begun to experiment with satyagraha—“truth force,” or nonviolent resistance—but to all appearances he was a Johannesburg lawyer in a business suit. It was 1908, the year he went to jail for the first time. Back in India, the élites were just starting to hear about him, but he was unknown to the broad public. He would not even return to India until 1914, when he was forty-five, older than J.F.K. when he took office as President.

If Martin Luther King, Jr., had lived as long as Gandhi, he would have died in 2007. If he had been destined to live as long as Martin Luther King, Sr., he would be eighty-two years old today. And he could still look forward to being an honored guest at President Barack Obama’s second Inauguration—though that, or something like it, and much else as astonishing or more so, might have occurred many years ago.